


blood magic

by kihadu



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-25
Updated: 2014-12-25
Packaged: 2018-03-03 10:23:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2847578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kihadu/pseuds/kihadu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is blood magic and blood magic, maleficar and something beyond, something more.</p><p>Hawke bled in the city and the city has taken her as its own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	blood magic

There is blood magic and blood magic, maleficar and something beyond, something more.

Hawke bled in the city and the city has taken her as its own. There are grooves in the stones from the blood of too many slaves excruciatingly exsanguinated, some creature in the deep that doesn’t so much bump the nighttime shadows as it roars so loud to rattle the stones in Hightown.

The land shifts, a Sister says, apologising as though it is merely geology she doesn’t understand and not something greater lingering far beneath her feet that she should fear. She puts her hand on the wall of the Chantry as if trying to settle an unruly dog.

Hawke’s blood has fallen too many times in these streets for the city to not know her name, her pulse, the taste of her innards. At night it licks at her dreams, carries the shape of her with it into the sunshine, the pleasant days, the lazy languid afternoons sprawled in the sun on the roof of Fenris’ mansion.

It is so easy to climb up there, what with a hole in his roof, even Sebastian giving up propriety for long enough to scramble from mattress to bedpost to crumbling tiles, lying down and leaning over to give Merrill a hand up. The city up high is a wonder, silencing them to stare at the streets all laid out as though they were ever peaceful.

Fenris breaks the moment. “That’s where you were beat up that time, and Hawke had to save you,” he tells Anders, pointing.

The Arishok, see, he came and he did not care. To him the city was merely stone, merely a thing constructed. Hawke needed salvation, blown in from the seas fleeing a horror that Kirkwall knows as well as it knows its own curling cellars. The Arishok declared the city a fallen place, heathens all of them deserving to die, but his belief was foreign and the city did not believe. It did not care to be converted.

Kirkwall had been given Hawke’s blood, and there is some magic not recorded.

 _Mine_ , it whispered, a susurrus of possession translating into strange drafts through the alleyways, a door swinging shut, one of the elves in Darktown hearing a language they did not know and shivering with unremembered instinct.

Hawke could not die at the hands of an unbeliever. She had given Kirkwall all she could offer, time and time again. There was no ritual to adhere to, no festivals, only steadfast action and unfaltering consistency. She practiced her own religion without knowing she did, the swing of her staff, the muttering of a spell under her breath.

Aveline, Varric, all of them, all of them were known and accepted and loved. Carver beneath in the roads had been unprotected, the mother an unbeliever - in her mind Kirkwall a city that contained, not understanding that a thing is not a thing if lived in and breathed on and died in. The walls contained the bones of the dead and too many mages had existed for the city to slumber, unthinking.

The city cannot protect all, of course. Some things are beyond the power of doorways and streets and squares. Some things cannot be unchanged, true gods bigger than a city.

But Hawke had bled in the city, unapologetic in letting her pain show in her hissed _please, please, not this one, just let me live one more fight._

The dead lie dreaming, in a city like Kirkwall, and the city takes them and they become the city. Some requests are beyond its power, but there are unknown magics, and Hawke has given her blood. The city cannot forget such an offering.


End file.
